The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh

Long Listed for the Man Booker Prize 2018

‘A gripping, sinister fable’ Margaret Atwood (via Twitter)‘An extraordinary debut. Otherworldly, luminous, precise… She is writing the way that Sofia Coppola would shoot the end of the world’ Guardian“Bold, inventive, haunting… With shades of Margaret Atwood and Eimear McBride, you’ll be bowled over by it”Stylist

“Visceral, hypnotic… with one of my favourite endings I’ve read in a long while” The Pool

Imagine a world very close to our own: where women are not safe in their bodies, where desperate measures are required to raise a daughter. This is the story of Grace, Lia and Sky, kept apart from the world for their own good and taught the terrible things that every woman must learn about love. And it is the story of the men who come to find them – three strangers washed up by the sea, their gazes hungry and insistent, trailing desire and destruction in their wake.

SOPHIE MACKINTOSH is the author of The Water Cure, which was was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018. She also won the 2016 White Review Short Story Prize and the 2016 Virago/Stylist Short Story competition, and has been published in Granta and TANK magazine among others.